The Pitt News
The independent student newspaper of the University of Pittsburgh | PIttnews.com | April 2, 2018 | Volume 108 | Issue 139
Students COMMUNITY PROTESTS FOR BLACK LIVES MATTER, NEVER AGAIN rethink society at annual TEDx event Briana Canady and Zane Crowell The Pitt News Staff
A man disagrees with demonstrators at Saturday’s #NEVER AGAIN X #BLACKLIVESMATTER protest. Thomas Yang VISUAL EDITOR
John Hamilton Managing Editor “What do we want? Gun control! When do we want it? Now!” “No justice, no peace. No racist police.” Both of those chants are common refrains heard in countless protests across the country — the former at gatherings calling for stricter gun laws and the latter at rallies condemning police brutality. But a group of high school students organized a protest — called #NEVERAGAIN X #BLACKLIVESMATTER — aimed at connecting the two themes Saturday. About 100 protesters marched through Oakland late that afternoon, chanting and waving signs with slogans that brought attention to both police
shootings of unarmed black men and demands for stricter gun control. Led by the Youth Power Collective, protesters marched onto the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Bigelow Boulevard, where they sat silently for between five to 10 minutes, blocking traffic. They then marched west down Fifth, turned onto South Bouquet Street and marched east down Forbes Avenue before forming a standing circle at the intersection of Forbes and Bigelow. High school student Nia Arrington led many of the chants, her voice cracking toward the end of the hour-long protest. “If you think police are not part of gun violence, you are the problem,” she yelled into a megaphone. “Police vio-
lence is gun violence.” Chelsea Calfo, 18, took part last month in a walkout at her high school, organized to protest lawmakers’ inaction on gun control after the shooting in Parkland, Florida. But she said the Black Lives Matter movement was excluded from the conversation in the walkout and in the Never Again movement, which was started by Parkland survivors. Bridget Deasy, 18, also came to the protest to show support for people of color who feel excluded from the current gun control movement. “All students of all colors and all races — we are fed up,” Deasy said. The march was briefly interrupted by a man who said it was disruptive. See Protest on page 2
Growing up in the South Side of Chicago, Jasiri Oronde Smith’s childhood was “100 percent black.” His friends, his neighbors and his family were all African-American. Then his family moved to Pittsburgh in the ’80s while he was still in high school. He met with racism and discrimination as a student at Gateway High School, which motivated him to found a club there called “Our Culture” to represent minority students. “We petitioned our school, and we got our school to teach its first black history class, and I was off as an activist,” Smith said. Smith told his story to a group of 130 people in the William Pitt Union as part of Pitt’s fourth annual TED event Saturday afternoon. The theme of this year’s event — which was independently organized and run by students — was (Re)think. Four local speakers from different fields shared their perspectives about how people can “rethink” what they know. Smith, also known as Pittsburgh-based rapper and activist Jasiri X, was the first speaker at the event. He recounted how he continued his activism later in life, when he began incorporating his beliefs into his music. He posted a song to MySpace called “Free the Jena Six” in 2007, which tells of six black teens in Jena, Louisiana, charged with attempted second-degree murder for beating a white student who had allegedly made a racist joke. Many people claimed the charges were excessive. Smith’s song ended up receiving widespread exposure, and he went to Jena to perform his song — with 50,000 other people protesting to drop the charges against the students. See TEDx on page 6